Ben Bova - The Aftermath

Theo was literally standing on his head, clinging to the ladder’s rung with one gloved hand. He reached for the hatch’s control panel, but stopped his shaking hand just in time. If I open the hatch to vacuum it’ll suck all the air out of the tunnel. But the tunnel’s already been punctured and the emergency hatches are shut. Whatever air we’re gonna lose we’ve already lost. Still he hesitated. Be better to conserve the air we’ve still got, he thought. We might be out here for who knows how long. Chrysalis is all torn up; there’s no help back at Ceres for us.

Standing on a ladder rung, he punched at the suit radio’s keyboard on the wrist of his suit.

“Mom?” he called.

She answered immediately, “Yes, Theo.”

“I need you to pump the air out of the tunnel.”

He heard her sharp intake of breath. “There’s vacuum on the other side of the hatch?”

Sharp, Mom, he thought. “That’s what the hatch pad says. And the tunnel’s been punctured someplace; all the emergency airlocks are closed. Pump out the air and store it in the standby tanks.”

Pauline said, “All right. Can you talk with your father?”

Theo hadn’t even tried that. “I’ll see.” He called over the suit radio. No answer. He pounded a gloved fist against the hatch. No response.

“He … he doesn’t answer,” he said at last.

Again his mother hesitated before replying, “The tunnel’s evacuated.”

“Right.”

It took Theo two tries to peck out the combination that opened the hatch, his hand was shaking so much. When it finally did slide noiselessly open, his heart clutched in his chest.

There was nothing there! The entire control pod was gone! Gasping, wide-eyed, Theo slowly climbed three more rungs until his head and shoulders were through the open hatchway.

He was in empty space. Hard pinpoints of stars stared down at him from the black depths of infinity. The ship that had attacked them was nowhere in sight. Their cargo of ore was a distant cloud of rocks, spinning farther away every heartbeat. The wheel-shaped structure of the ore ship curved away on either side of him but there was no trace of the control pod. Theo saw the severed stumps of the struts that had held the pod in place, blackened by the blast of their explosive bolts.

Gone. Dad’s gone. He’s left us.

“Theo?” his mother’s voice called in his helmet earphones. “Is your father hurt? Or…”

“He’s gone,” Theo said, feeling a deadly cold numbness creeping over him. “He’s abandoned us, Mom.”

“Your father did not abandon us,” Pauline Zacharias said firmly.

Theo thought she looked angry. At me. She’s boiled at me because Dad took off and left us. She’s not mad at Dad, she’s spitting mad at me.

He was sitting tensely on the sofa in the family living room, feeling tired and angry and scared. Angie sat on the armchair at one end of the sofa, rigid and staring hard-eyed at him, as if he’d done something wrong. Mother was pacing slowly across the room, past the family portrait they’d taken years ago, when Theo was barely ten.

“He didn’t abandon us,” Pauline repeated.

“He blew the explosive bolts and took off in the control pod,” Theo said, his voice low, stubborn. “He left us here drifting.”

His mother stopped pacing and looked directly at him. “What your father did,” she said in a hard, cold voice, “was to draw that attack ship away from us.”

“Yeah,” Theo retorted. “And he left us without controls, without the navigation computer, without communications. The main tunnel’s been punctured, spit knows what other damage the ship’s taken.”

Pauline stared at her son for a long moment, then sank into the nearest chair, her face frozen in a mask of doubt and worry.

Angie broke the silence. “But we’ll be okay. Won’t we? I mean, we can get back to Ceres and—”

“There’s nothing left at Ceres!” Theo snapped. “He killed them all! And we’re heading outward, deeper into the Belt, toward Jupiter!”

For an instant Angie looked as if she would burst into tears. But Pauline reached across the space between them and grasped her arm.

“It’s not that bad,” she said calmly. “We have plenty of food and water. We have the main engine—”

“Which we can’t control.”

“Can’t control?” Angie’s eyes went wide.

“The command pod’s gone. All the controls’re gone.”

Pauline fixed her son with a stern look. “There’s the backup command pod.”

“If it works,” Theo said sourly. “Nobody’s even been in there for more’n a year.”

“It will work,” Pauline said flatly. “That’s your responsibility, Theo. Yours and Angela’s. Get to the backup command pod and get it up and running. We can’t let ourselves continue to drift outward; we’ve got to get control of this vessel back in our hands.”

“Yeah, sure,” he groused.

“Yes, certainly,” Pauline said, with iron in her voice. “We’re not going to sit on our hands and do nothing. If we’re going to be saved, we’ve got to save ourselves.”

“Can we…?” Angie murmured.

“Of course we can,” said Pauline. “And as soon as you get into the backup pod you set up a tracking beacon so your father can home in on it and get back to us.”

Theo started to answer that his father had run away from them and wouldn’t be likely to come back, but he held his tongue. Some things you just don’t say to your mother, even if they’re true, he thought.

Turning to Angie, Pauline said, “I want the two of you to work together. No bickering. Do you understand?”

Angela nodded. “I will if he will.”

“I’ll be all right,” Theo said to his sister. Then he added, “As long as you don’t try to lord it over me.”

“Lord it over you? When did I ever—”

“You’re always pulling that older sister stuff, like you know it all.”

“That’s not true!”

“Yes it is, dammit!”

“Stop it!” Pauline shouted. “Stop it this instant! Theo, I won’t have you using such language. And Angela, you will treat your brother with respect. Is that clear? Both of you?”

Angela nodded, her lips pressed into a thin bloodless line.

“Theo?” his mother demanded.

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry about the language.”

“You should be. If your vocabulary is so limited you should study your dictionary.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he mumbled again. It was Mom’s old line, about the dictionary. He looked over at Angie; she glared back at him.

“You two have to work together,” their mother insisted. “We don’t have time for your little spats and name-calling. You both have to start behaving like adults.”

Angie behave like an adult? Theo grumbled silently. When the universe stops expanding, maybe.

Pauline stood up. “Now then, if we all work together we can get through this. It’ll be quite an adventure to tell your children about!”

“Your grandchildren,” Angie said, with a faint smile.

Theo shook his head. Busywork, he said to himself. Mom just wants to keep us busy so we won’t have time to think about the fix Dad’s left us in. But she’s right; nobody’s going to help us, so we’ll have to help ourselves. Or die.

“Theo, we need the backup command center up and functioning. The sooner the better.”

“Right,” he said, thinking, Maybe she’s right. Maybe, if I can get the backup command pod on line, maybe we can patch up this bucket and steer it back to civilization. There’s nothing left at Ceres; we’ll have to get back to the Earth/Moon vicinity. Or maybe the exploration base at Mars. Where is Mars now? On our side of its orbit or all the way over on the other side of the Sun? I’ll have to check that once I get the nav system running.